Untapping the Power of Indirect Relationships in Entity Summarization

Knowledge graphs form large networks of millions of entities (e.g., Michelle Obama, Barack Obama) and relationships (e.g., married). To obtain an overview of the entity, we need to inspect a potentially large number of relationships to other entities. For this reason, entity summarization aims to extract succinct but expressive descriptions of each entity. Yet, existing methods build their summaries only based on the immediate connections of an entity, disregarding how indirect relationships contain essential information for describing the entity (e.g., understanding Michelle Obama also via her husband's role as former president). We propose IRES, an unsupervised entity summarization method built on graph theoretical principles. We draw a notable connection between the informativeness of a summary and graph partitioning, and devise an effective approach to learn diverse aspects that characterize an entity. In a comprehensive experimental study, IRES shows superior summary quality. In particular, when full neighborhood information is available, IRES outperforms existing methods by 6 percentage points F1 while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.